Details
Conformer generation is useful in many aspects of both molecular modeling in general and drug discovery in particular. The relative energies of small molecule conformations play a crucial role in determining shape, function, and activity. Moreover, the ability to generate a bioactive conformer is a vital pre-requisite to any successful computer-aided drug design project.
While it's impossible for a conformer search algorithm to determine a flexible ligand's bioactive conformer with absolute confidence, carefully considered search criteria do allow an algorithm to reject conformers likely to be high energy or inactive. Beyond merely expediting the conformer search process, this approach creates efficiently sized conformer sets that nevertheless contain a reasonable approximation of the bioactive geometry.
Efficient conformer sets have wide-ranging ramifications in downstream applications. For example, with fewer irrelevant conformations to process, virtual database screens and shape-based similarity searches run to completion in a fraction of the time without sacrificing accuracy.
Software Link: ConfGen - Ligand−Receptor Analysis Software
